The Fate of Mice (26 page)

“We won’t leave our baby, Sorrel.”

“What if I die? What if the baby dies? Having babies is hard work. No midwife will help me, Quartz. We don’t have money to pay anybody, to buy silence.”

“We’ll figure something out. Hush now. Hush, Sorrel.” But fear rose in him, too. They couldn’t always be moving, with a child. They’d have to settle somewhere, and where was safe? “We’ll go to the mountains, the high places. We’ll find our way there before you’re too big.”

“That’s where the worst freaks are,” she said. “The ones who eat people, the monsters who’d eat us too, oh Quartz, you’ve heard the tales - ”

“Tales. That’s all they are. Tales told by normals, and how much truth can those hold? Who’s been to the mountains and come back to tell the tales?”

“Nobody! Because they get eaten!” Her heart fluttered wildly, and he put out a hand to soothe it.

“Sorrel, hush. They don’t come back to say, so we don’t know. Maybe they don’t come back because it’s so beautiful, because they’re happy. Maybe they don’t come back because—because the freaks welcome them. Maybe all the freaks there are the ones who’ve gone to have their babies in peace, like we’ll do, Sorrel.”

She shuddered, her heart still racing. “And maybe there’s no freak settlement in the mountains at all. Maybe the normals put that story out so they can trap and kill any freaks who try to go there, jump them on the road.”

He’d thought that, too, more than once. It was why he had never suggested going there until now. He closed his eyes. “We have months. We have months to get there. We’ll find a side road, a secret way. A cave. We’ll be careful.”

And so they began to walk towards the mountains, visible only as a faint blue line in the distance, and then only in the clearest weather. They walked as quickly as they could, and yet they found the going slow. Sorrel was sick and grew weak; she craved foods Quartz could only get in towns, butter and cheeses and cured meats, and he had to take to thieving to meet her appetites. Her ankles swelled as her stomach did, and sometimes, when she cried out in pain, Quartz found himself cursing the child, wishing that this baby would either lose itself or come more easily. He himself was afraid, afraid. He had never wished to nurture any small thing, only to harm it, and he found himself craving release, longing to torture rabbits he startled in the fields or the piglets they passed being driven to market, hungering for the feel of blood flowing through his fingers, for the stench of burned flesh and the agonized screams of the slaughtered.

He shared one such fantasy with Sorrel, but her grimaces were so dreadful, her heart so reckless in its pounding, that he stopped, knowing his own face ashen. She could not protect him anymore. Her world was all the child within her belly, and so must his be. And so he tried to content himself with hunting game she did not wish to eat, with skinning fowl whose smell, as they roasted, made her retch.

And yet the baby clung, and her belly grew, and the mountains grew nearer. They walked uphill now, more and more slowly, and their choices of road narrowed. Quartz scouted other paths as Sorrel slept, but found only wildernesses of brambles, pathless forests, sheer rocky slopes: places that would be difficult for him to travel, impossible for her. There was one road only, now. And he thought of the tales, the tales of how no one survived in the mountains, and dread settled in his gut, as heavy as if he, too, bore a child.

There was one road only, and it led to a small village they must pass to reach the heights. They arrived there at dusk, Sorrel exhausted and dragging. They stood in a square surrounded by houses and barns: Quartz could hear bleating and neighing, and had to close his eyes to fight his lust for torn flesh, for pain and blood. He opened them only when he heard panting next to him: Sorrel, fighting for breath. He put his hand on the cloth covering her heart; it beat alarmingly, very very fast and then too slow. “The baby,” she said. “I think—”

“Too early,” he said. “It’s too early, Sorrel, it can’t be coming yet.” Only seven months had passed, and they weren’t in the mountains. They weren’t safe yet.

“Babies come when they will,” someone said, and Quartz looked up to find a woman in front of them, staring at them in the fading light. She was wearing a red kerchief, and immediately the color made him yearn for blood. “What’s that your wife’s holding in her arms?”

Quartz swallowed. “An infant, we—”

“She’s so big with one child, and has another so small?”

“Wet-nurse,” Sorrel said, her voice somewhere between a whisper and a moan. “My sister’s child. I had a baby died, and my sister died and I took hers, and then we made this one who’s coming, see. Goodwife, I need to lie down now.”

Quartz had no idea if the woman in red had been convinced by Sorrel’s explanation or not, although it was far cleverer than anything he’d have been able to invent, quick brain or no. “I can work,” he said, his voice tight. “To pay for any help you give us. I’m good with my hands. I can thatch roofs, slaughter animals.”

No one was listening to him. The woman in red had taken Sorrel’s arm, with a clucking sound, and was leading her towards one of the houses. Quartz followed numbly. How many people lived here? All he had seen so far was the one woman, whose kerchief looked so much like blood, and he could kill her sure, could wring her scrawny neck as if she were only a chicken. He let himself picture that for a moment, imagine how her spine would feel snapping under his hands. He let the lust for pain fill him. And then Sorrel screamed.

Sorrel screamed, and he ran to follow the sound, found himself standing in one corner of a lamplit room as the woman carried in towels and basins of water and Sorrel thrashed on the bed, moaning, and now the woman was doing something between Sorrel’s legs and now Sorrel was screaming again and now the woman was pulling her wrap away, trying to give her more freedom of movement maybe, pulling away her clothing to reveal her heart beating there, her heart pounding on her chest, just as Quartz had seen it that day so many years ago when Sorrel had sat in the ditch, battering herself with the jagged rock.

He had to protect her. He had promised. He had promised, and he had never failed in that promise, whatever else he had done or not done. He had promised that only he would hurt her, no one else. The woman with the red kerchief was reaching for Sorrel’s heart as Sorrel screamed, and Quartz leaped forward, tears choking him, and a rush of blood and something else poured out of Sorrel—blood, too much blood—and the woman grabbed Sorrel’s heart and Quartz tackled her, made her let go of Sorrel, dragged her as far away from the birthing bed as he could to protect the beating heart there. And then he strangled the woman in the red kerchief, killed her as he had wished to do since the moment he first saw her; he dug his fingers into her throat and felt her own heart stop beating. This wasn’t even cruelty. It was justified. She had reached for Sorrel’s heart before ever he reached for hers.

The lamp had gone out, kicked over or snuffed by the wind of the fight. Quartz smelled blood and shit, heard only a thin wailing cry. “Sorrel?” he said. He could not hear her heart. “Sorrel!” He began crawling towards the bed on all fours, afraid that he would trip and fall on her, hurt her, if he tried to walk in this crowded, wet darkness. “Sorrel, can you hear me?”

And then he saw flickering light outside, heard voices and footsteps, and here were more lamps now, held by a group of men who pressed in through the door, who had cudgels and knives—Quartz could see the metal shining in the lamplight—and they were surrounding him and surrounding the bodies, and he heard someone say, “The baby’s alive. Little girl. Looks normal, but who can tell? The mother wasn’t.”

“We heard the screaming,” one of the men said to Quartz, and Quartz did not know why his voice was so kind. “We came to help you. You got them, didn’t you? Nobody right’s lived in this place for years, so when we heard voices, we knew it must be freaks.”

“What?” Quartz said. The man who had spoken to him was holding up the red kerchief; someone else kicked the dead body, and through the gaps between people’s legs, Quartz saw now that there had been no hair or skull under that kerchief, but only brain, a gray wrinkled thing that maybe had pulsed once like Sorrel’s heart, but now was still. A foot came down and ground the brain into slimy mush.

“Freak,” someone said, and Quartz closed his eyes. The woman in the red kerchief had been reaching for Sorrel’s heart in love or joy or anyway knowledge, not hatred. She had been reaching out to claim one of her own. He had understood nothing he had seen.

“Must’ve holed up here to have the whelp,” someone grunted. “Some sicko raped her maybe, or she got knocked up by one of her own who didn’t want her, and this one came too, to help her.” They hadn’t connected Quartz to the women yet. Of course not; he looked normal.

Now someone was talking to him. “You found them here and took care of them, right? Good man. Wish we’d gotten here in time to help.”

“Give me the baby,” Quartz said. He forced himself to stand up. “Give me the baby, if she’s normal.” How was he going to feed her? “Give me the baby. She’s mine. My spoil for what I’ve done, for killing those two.” The words caught in his throat. “Give me the baby and bring me some milk. There are animals here. Find one I can milk.”

“You want to raise a freak-whelp? Be a while before you can use her.” Laughter.

But they brought her, the tiny, mewling, naked thing: someone had cut the cord that had bound her to her mother, as Sorrel had so long ago wanted to cut the cord that held her to her own heart. The baby was howling, and Quartz took off his shirt and wrapped her in it and looked down at her, knowing that he was truly a freak now too, because now he held his own heart in his hands. He cradled in his arms what was most precious and fragile, what could most easily be taken from him: what, if it was hurt, would cause him the deepest and most unending pain. He must not weep, because the men around him would not understand. He bent and kissed the baby’s forehead; and when they snickered, felt the old blood-fury seize him.

I don’t know if it was a miracle or not, what happened at the hospital. I can’t make up my mind about that. I always thought those headlines about “Instant Miracle Cures” in the trashy supermarket newspapers were a crock. You know the ones:
THALIDOMIDE BOY GROWS ARMS TO PROTECT MOM FROM RAPIST!
“I had to save her, and was the only way!” BARNEY PERFORMS CPR ON SEARS SANTA CLAUS! “I was walking through the TV department and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe, and this little purple guy jumps straight out of the set and starts pounding on my chest!”
SIAMESE TWINS SEPARATE WHEN THE MEN THEY LOVE MOVE TO OPPOSITE COASTS!
“The doctors said it could never be done because we shared a brain, but love conquers all!”

I never believed any of that stuff, but what happened at the hospital would sound just like that, if I let it. So I don’t know anymore. Maybe my story’s a crock too, or maybe those trashy ones are truer than anybody ever thought. One thing I can tell you, though: if there are miracles, they don’t happen in an instant. Whatever a miracle is, it takes its own sweet time growing. When I see those newspapers now, I wonder what stories those people would tell if they had more than two square inches of the
Weekly World News
to do it in. Because if anything real happened to them they do have stories, trust me on that, and probably long ones, too.

Mine started months ago, the day I went to church with Mandy. I’m not religious, never have been—nobody in my family ever has been, so far as I know—but Mandy’s been my best friend for thirty years, and when your best friend calls you up crying and asks you to go to church with her, you do it, even if you’ve never been too sure you even believe in God, even if you’re very sure that you don’t believe in anything the priest in that church has to say. The last time I’d been in that church was when Mandy and Bill got married. I was their maid of honor, and I shouldn’t have been. Cindy should have been. So I guess the story really started back then, twenty years ago, because when Mandy asked me to be maid of honor I said, “Now wait a minute, how come you aren’t asking your sister that? That’s a sister’s job.”

We were sitting in Sam’s Soda Shop, where we always went to have important conversations. Mandy had called me and told me to meet her there, and I figured she needed to tell me about some fight she’d had with Bill, or fret about how his mother still didn’t like her. We’d ordered what we always did, a root beer float for me and a vanilla shake for her, and then she came out with the maid of honor thing and I choked and started spurting root beer out my nose. There are certain ways of doing things, in a little town like this. I don’t know how it works other places, but if you get married in Innocence, Indiana, and you don’t ask your sister to hold the bouquet, that has to mean you don’t love her. What’s worse, it means you want everybody to know you don’t love her, because even sisters who can’t stand each other do what’s right at weddings. And I knew Mandy loved Cindy. She was the only person in her family who did. “You have to ask Cindy,” I said. “She’s your
sister.”

Mandy hadn’t touched her shake. She hadn’t even taken the paper wrapper off the straw. “I can’t ask her. My parents would kill me.”

“Your parents?” I’d never liked Mandy’s parents, and I wasn’t very good at hiding it. I knew they must be mad at Cindy about something, but they were always mad at Cindy about something: smoking or drinking or having too many boyfriends or having the wrong boyfriends or having boyfriends at all. Plenty of other girls in town did all the same things Cindy did, but they lied about it, and Cindy never would. Mr. and Mrs. Mincing were ashamed of her: not because of what she did, but because everybody knew about it. They cared about their reputation more than they cared about Cindy, and Mandy knew that as well as I did, and she hated it too. So I shook my head at her and said, “Mandy, your parents are
already
married, aren’t they? What business is it of theirs? Whose wedding is this, anyway?”

“They’re paying for it,” Mandy said, in this tiny voice she gets when she’s really upset, and then, all in a rush, “She’s pregnant. She’s starting to show: that’s how we found out. And she won’t say who the father is and she won’t say she’s sorry and I’m not supposed to tell anybody, Cece, not even you, so you have to
promise
to keep it a secret.”